Archive for Science Fiction

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week we have published another batch of four papers, the same number as last week, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 64 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 179.

Before announcing the week’s papers I’ll add three other updates you might find interesting:

  1.  When I looked at NASA/ADS this morning to help construct this post I saw that papers published in OJAp have now garnered over 2500 citations between them;
  2. We had a good response to our recent call for new members of the Editorial Board and have added four new members here;
  3. Last week we received a significant (unsolicited) cash donation from a higher education institution based in Europe to help with our work in Diamond Open Access. If any other organizations or individuals would like to do similar then please contact me!

Now, in chronological order, the four papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

First one up is: “Widespread disruption of resonant chains during protoplanetary disk dispersal by Bradley M S Hansen (UCLA), Tze-Yeung Yu (UCLA) and Yasuhiro Hasegawa (JPL), all based in California, USA.  The paper presents a discussion of the effect of a dispersing protoplanetary disk on the evolution of low-mass planets around a Solar mass star.  It was published on 21st July 2024 and is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

 

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper to announce is “Using A One-Class SVM To Optimize Transit Detection” by Jakob Roche of the University of South Florida, also in the USA (but not in California). This articles discusses the advantages of One-Class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in the context of exoplanet detection. Its in the folder called Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 25th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

 

The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The next paper, also published on 25th July 2024, is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Its primary classification on arXiv is General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), but it is cross-listed on astro-ph so we considered it for publication and had it refereed, with favourable results. It is entitled “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” and is by Katy Clough (QMUL, UK), Tim Dietrich (Potsdam, Germany) and Sebastian Khan (Cardiff, UK).  Looking at the title of this paper you might be tempted to dismiss it on the grounds that warp drives are the stuff of science fiction (which they are), but this paper is really a rigorous technical study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition, inspired by the idea of a warp drive.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last, published on 26th July 2024, we have a paper with the title “A study of gamma-ray emission from OJ 287 using Fermi-LAT from 2015-2023” by Vibhavasu Pasumarti and Shantanu Desai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. It is an investigation of the properties of gamma-ray emission from OJ287 (a BL Lac object) using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT).  This one is also in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; here is the overlay

You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week.

2 Comments »

There is no Zero

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 1, 2010 by telescoper

The Incredible Shrinking Man is a science fiction film made in 1957. If you haven’t seen it before its title will probably make you think it’s a downmarket B-movie, but it’s far from that. In fact it was very well received by film critics when it was first released and in 2009 was added to the Library of Congress list of films considered to be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. The  special effects used to portray the main character reducing in size were remarkable in its day, but for me the film is worth it for the wonderful ending shown in the clip:

I first saw this film on TV when I was at school and the final monologue made such an impression on me that it keeps popping into my mind, as it just did. The field of astroparticle physics encompasses cosmology, the study of the Universe on the largest scales accessible to observation (many billions of light years) as well as the smallest dimensions we can probe using the techniques of particle physics.  As the Incredible Shrinking Man realises, these are just two aspects of the same underlying unity. There’s nothing specifically new about this line of reasoning, however; I posted a poem a while ago that dates from 1675 which has a similar theme.

I decided to put the clip up now for two reasons. One is that the phrase “there is no zero” (which has passed me by on previous occasions I’ve watched the clip)  reminds of some stuff I wrote recently for a book that I’m struggling to finish, about how there’s no such thing as nothing in physics. Space is much more than the absence of matter and even empty space isn’t the same thing as nothing at all. Zero is also just the flip side of infinity and I don’t think infinity exists in nature either. When infinity appears in our theories it’s just a flag to tell us we don’t know what we’re doing. Many others have thought this thought: both Gauss and, later, Hilbert argued against the possibility of there being realised infinities in nature. My old friend and erstwhile collaborator George Ellis adheres to this view too.

The other reason for posting it is that, in these days of the Incredible Shrinking Science Budget, it’s important that we recognize and nurture the deep connections between things by supporting science in all its forms. Once we start trying to unpick its strands, the web of knowledge will all too quickly unravel.


Share/Bookmark

17 Comments »